After All These Years, Finals May Be a Test

OK, what do you call it when the East team turns the NBA Finals into an actual series?

Uh, unprecedented?

Not really, even if it seemed like that for the five years after Michael Jordan left the Chicago Bulls, in which time East teams won six Finals games and TV ratings dropped from their zenith, 18.7 in 1998, to last spring’s 7.5.

For lack of competition, this was unprecedented. These things are supposed to be cyclical, as in the days the East ruled, winning 12 Finals in a row from 1959 to 1970, 10 by the Boston Celtics, one each for the Philadelphia 76ers and New York Knicks.

However, most of those Finals weren’t walkovers. Five went seven games and three went six.

The ‘50s and ‘60s are like colonial times in the NBA. However, the renaissance of the ‘80s was a product of great Finals, with the Lakers and/or Celtics appearing every season from 1980 to 1989, two seven-game series and six that went six.

In the ‘90s, when the Bulls ruled, there was one seven-game Finals and five that went six.

Since Jordan left, however, it’s been a four, two fives, two sixes (including 2000 after the Lakers led the Indiana Pacers, 3-1) and no sevens.

After the lasers and the fireworks (remember the 2001 Finals when NBC put U2 on at halftime and made its announcers play “Celebrity Weakest Link”?), the league is still selling competition so getting the Lakers in the Finals was only half the battle, unless they decided to fight on camera.

To say the walkovers have taken a toll on the NBA’s standing is an understatement. Even with the New Jersey Nets taking the San Antonio Spurs to six games last spring, the universal presumption is the West will win and the East doesn’t have a chance.

On ESPN’s “Sports Reporters” Sunday, the New York Times’ Bill Rhoden stuck up for the Detroit Pistons, calling them “an excellent team.

“Having said that,” Rhoden added, “I think they’ll win one game.”

Then there was the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan, a former Celtic beat writer and the co-author of Larry Bird’s biography.

“For people who love the game like I did,” Ryan said, “interest can’t be restored with anything less than seven games.”

This may not be exactly true, but both writers now see the NBA at its most mediocre, the once-storied franchises in their cities having gone out of the business of winning titles.

Everywhere but here, fans still live for the day the Lakers fall, so the league just needed someone in the East to stand up to them. When the Pistons did Sunday, if only for a game, the overnight rating came in at 11.6, suggesting a competitive Finals could top the World Series’ 12.8 rating last fall.

Happily for the NBA, if not for the Lakers, Sunday may not have been a fluke, or the Lakers just being “too cool,” as Shaquille O’Neal noted, or “traumatized” by the sight of O’Neal wearing a thong, as Kobe Bryant joked.

Who, them panic?

The Lakers may go down laughing or modeling daring fashions but after all the times they’ve been there, don’t expect them to get upset, or at least not until they lose another game.

Nevertheless, not that this occurred to me or many others two days ago, but there’s a scenario in which the outgunned Pistons can win.

No, really. It’s like the Minnesota Timberwolves’ scenario in the Western Conference finals, hoping the Lakers, who have three starters 32 and over and don’t have a long bench or great balance, wear down.

So far, this series is a lot like 2001, when Larry Brown’s 76ers (seriously, how many coaches bring two different teams this far in four years?) shocked the Lakers in Game 1.

It was the same deal, Brown single-covering O’Neal, which is what Larry always does, because that’s what Frank McGuire and Dean Smith taught him at North Carolina.

Dikembe Mutombo, the reigning defensive player of the year, was Brown’s center in 2001. Ever obliging, Mutombo announced he didn’t fear O’Neal, who was “not a monster or a tank where he will destroy you or shoot you or kill you.”

O’Neal proceeded to lay Mutombo out so many times, there were games in which it looked like they might invoke the three-knockdown rule. O’Neal averaged 33 and the Lakers won the next four.

Seeing as how the Pistons wouldn’t let them run a play Sunday, Coach Phil Jackson will try making Detroit pay by turning O’Neal loose inside again.

Having acquired 6-foot-11 Rasheed Wallace, the Pistons are finally a full-size contender but they’re still not like the West’s elite teams, which keep three or four big men on the roster just in case O’Neal looms on the horizon. Sunday O’Neal threw the Pistons around like kids trying to ride a rhino.

Of course, it’s three years since O’Neal’s 2001 triumph, in which time he has missed 45 games for injuries, not all of them babying boo-boos, as Bryant suggested last fall.

Stamina is now an issue for O’Neal, who has trouble sustaining his great starts (as Sunday when he had 20 of his 34 points by halftime) or coming back on short rest (he’s averaging 24.6 on two or more days’ rest this post-season, 17.6 on one.)

He had five days’ rest before Game 1, but will have only one before Games 2, 3, 5 and 6.

Unlike the 76ers in 2001 and the Timberwolves, the Pistons weren’t out on their feet when the series started.

So it would be wise for the Lakers not to assume too much because nothing’s guaranteed, even to them.